So if we take this out, will the game still work?

It would really emphasize lances.

The big ships could mount broadsides, and really you don't really get much use out of strength values above 6 anyway.

The little ships without a prow slot will be hurting (not to mention lances are power/space hungry anyway).

Would the system work, yes.

Would it mean changes to the balance as they have it now, yes.

It would shift things to the big ships a bit.

I don't see why not, but I don't how you would justify it other than fiat.

Fortinbras said:

No need to justify it. Each weapon has to penetrate armour individually. It's not like the shots magically combining together isn't already fiat (compare to how armour works for personal/vehicle combat).

llsoth said:

Emphasizing Lances is a good thing IMO.

Making Broadsides more attractive than basic batteries is a good thing too.

IMO, taking little ships down a notch isn't a bad thing either.

Still, with two sets of Mars-pattern macrocannons, it's quite possible to knock down a void shield and still do damage against another escort with 16 or so armour. Heavier batteries (Ryza plasma, Mezoa , etc.) are even more valuable with this change as a few extra points of damage go further with this change.

HappyDaze said:

All changes that I would like to see as well.

My group and I will have to run some sample battles and build a few sample ships to see how it turns out.

Interesting idea

HappyDaze said:

Starship weapons do not equal personal/vehicle weapons.

A bunch of simultaneous hits against a lattice or superstructure of some kind will cause more stress than a single hit on a single point?

Anyways, I find it interesting you're so quick to condemn me for things I find fairly benign while you propose crap like this that I would never in a million years consider taking away from the players. Hypocritical, much?

Fortinbras said:

And why don't starship weapons vs starship armour equal personal/vehicle weapons vs. personal/vehicle armour? No good reason in particular. Further, your second line is total nonsense - how many hits from 5" guns did it take in WWII to get through the main armor belt of a battleship?

I really think that adjusting things to a per weapon basis is better, short of a total overhaul where each shot has to penetrate a lesser armour value like with vehicular combat. And this isn't being taken away from players - it's a universal change to all starships - those of the PCs and NPCs alike. It's being done to prevent the "battery buzzsaw" and the problems of relatively ineffective larger ships and lances. Quite unlike your situation, it's not being implemented to justify punitive meansures against players as a remedy for GM hurt.

Of course it's not. It's not like you're taking away the ability for a group with an SP:20 ship to stand and fight against a larger ship or anything, or reducing your starship combat to a boring series of armor-ignoring lance-fests. No, I don't see the disadvantage to the player at all!

Your ego never ceases to amaze.

Fortinbras said:

It would only be a disadvantage if my players were using a lightly armed, battery-only vessel to fight a heavily armoured vessel (vessel size and class are only matter indirectly in that they set the base armour value). In such a situation, I'd expect that just shooting the opponent would be a less than satisfactory solution.

This change would make the standard frigates from Rogue Trader very weak in combat.

Considering that most parties are going to start with a frigate (PF/SP allocation trends towards this), this would make the start of many campaigns rather different, since space combat would be a long, slow attrition battle. I would find that rather boring, considering that getting enough damage to beat an enemy with say 18 Armour and 35 Hull will take really long.

HappyDaze said:

Careful, you're beginning to sound a lot like me. I guess things aren't so black and white when it comes to balance, are they?

Whizzer said:

I prefer that starship battles are long attrition battles. This means that getting critical hits will matter more to the outcome since simply buzzsawing through all the hull is going to be time consuming. Battles can still be over fairly quickly with some good damage rolls, especially if using lances or heavier macrobatteries (the Munitorium is made more attractive with this change too).

Combined salvos rarely result in a "quick" kill in my experience. Rather they result in a very slow battle of attrition as long as your players didn't go for the "double Sunsear", as the players nickel and dime the opposing ship, crippling it with critical hits as well. Lances, on the other hand, tend to make battles over in a matter of a few turns. If I could make one change to the starship combat system personally, I'd change lances to ignore only half of the armor instead of the entirety.

So I really don't understand what you're bitching about. Of course, I'm not usually the one who tends to complain about other GM's idiosyncracies.

Fortinbras said:

If you hit with two macrobatteries, the second one typically outperforms a lance in ignoring armour. There's a big thread on it, and I've looked closely enough to see that the problem is real.

I've also played out combats where ships have lost 20-30 hull in a single combined salvo. For smaller ships, that's the majority of what they start with, and so I really have to disagree on the RAW not giving up quick kills.

Your calculations mainly assume near-optimum degrees of success on the BS roll. In general my players are lucky to get 3 hits out of 6 on a combined salvo fire. Yes, the damage on full hits can be massive, but it still amounts to only 2-3 points of damage per hit.

If you really are inclined towards it, why not just extend void shield hit-reduction to negate one entire battery's worth of salvos? It never made sense to me that a single macrocannon hit was equivalent to a lance strike against a void shield anyways. That way a macrocannon can still be the lead-in for lance strikes, but a full macrocannon suite still has some potency.

Some unexpected results...

Built a couple ships and did a few mock battles against myself (will do it with my friends later on to confirm).

This whole experiment has improved my ship building skills.

Rather than making small ships less effective it made them more effective or at least let me see a better way to build them.

Rather than doing a double sunsear, or other double combo for that matter go one light one heavy. Use the light battery to knock down the shields and then hit them with the heavy (ryza, melta). This seems to be doing MORE damage not less.

First it gives you the possibility for 2 crits per round not one.

Second getting more than 4 degrees of success is a pretty rare event.

When you combine the rolls into one salvo you need to get spare successes to account for the shields. So if you are going to get any use out of a combined salvo against a target with 2 shields you need to get 7 succeses to make it pay for you. Example

Mars + Ryza vs cruiser, you need 2 success (beat your target roll by more than 10 to his shields with the mars) Then you need 4 success you max out your plasma guns, (beat the roll by 30) damage avg damage on the 4 hit plasma is 38

Double sunsear vs cruiser, you have a str 8 salvo and get 1 roll, you need 2 success to his shields, now to get the same number of hits as the staggered approach you need 6 successes (beat the roll by at least 50) To get more hits you need to beat the roll by at least 60. Avg damage on 4 sunsear hits 30, 5 sunsear hits 37.5 .... so to do more damage you need to pound out a max strike of 8 hits beating the roll by a huge 70 points...

Also the mars + ryza actually frees up space and power which may allow you to take a munitorium or other goodies.

You do give up range, but the small ships are fast and closing has never been much of a problem so...

I do not know how the actual math works out but I would guess that on average getting that beating the roll by 10 and 30 happens more than beating it by 70 once (if it is even possible to do so).

So the proposed house rule actually has very little effect on players building ships... seems better to build a small and heavy combo and fire them separately than anything else.

Note that, with what I've suggested, the attacker still gets to decide how the hits are allocated. If you use two batteries and score 3 hits with one and 1 hit with the other, apply the 1 hit to the void shield and then roll the three hits to punch through the armour. If you score 4 hits and 3 hits, you might want to apply the 4 hit salvo to the shield and go with the 3 remaining hits to punch through armour (along with the second salvo of 3 hits). You might instead "play it safe" and the shield with the 3 hit salvo (leaving the remaining 2 hits unlikely to punch through armour) content that the 4 hit salvo will almost certainly punch through. There are still some choices here.

If I were really inclined to it, I'd rework the entire system to use something along the lines of each shot being reduced for armour, and lances having a high Pen value. Unfortunately, that's more time than I have to spend on it right now.

llsoth said:

There is an error in your math. By RAW, combined salvos are not rolled together for hitting, only for damage. you would not need 6+ DoS, just max out each individual battery's strength and then add them together for damage.

If, as you suggest, they are combined for purposes of hitting too, then my houserule would not be needed.

Bleh! never mind then all my work for naught

Well then your proposed rule does indeed have some effect!

Down with the escorts and in with the capital ships!!!

I really like this idea. I'm a little afraid it is a bit heavy on the nerfstick towards macrobatteries... but it is definitely going in the right direction. I'm not sure if there is a middle ground possible with this change... maybe the second volley gets gets some kind of bonus? That's probably going to cause a lot of fiddly problems.

Still: like the idea, let me know how it works out. Is there still a role for batteries?

Macrobatteries can still punch through any of the ships currently in the game with a good attack roll and a good damage roll. Against most ships, three hits (base hit plus 2 DoS) is enough to get damage through with an average damage roll. If you have multiple batteries, the one scoring the least hits can be applied to the shield letting the other one use all of its hits to dig through the armour. This will encourage closing range and taking other steps to maximize DoS on attacks.

Consider the 'hardest' ship in the game: Forward Armour of a Cruiser (Lunar or Tyrant) with Armour Plating, Armoured Prow, Excess Void Armour and Wrested from a Space Hulk = 30 Armour. This ship is almost battery-proof, but Pyros or Ryza batteries hitting with 4 hits average 38 damage (42 with a Munitorium). Yes, these are the high-end batteries, but I'm also comparing to the most armoured ship possible (until Battlefleet Koronus shows up). Against ships with Armour 16-19, most batteries with three hits will start chipping away at the opponent, and the more powerful battery weapons will seem proportionately more deadly in comparison than they currently do.

Yes, but do they outperform Lances against low-armor targets still? (I have no clue, I'm on temporary math hiatus while I focus on other subjects. Although I bet if I just dug out that weapon DPS spreadsheet that was made a few weeks ago, I could just equip one battery at a time and let the program do the work for me...)

I also like the compromise of deciding which volley does the shield negating after you roll the dice. So even though you can't combine, it's like you get the better of two rolls (most of the time, assuming at least one of those volleys hits once or twice).

If you wanted to have capital ships nasty, you could say that macrobatteries can't be combined, but macrobattery broadsides can be.

We've been disregarding the oppurtunity to combine salvoes for a few games now and it seems to work pretty well. It's a simple change, but one that increases the power of cruisers because they can bring more guns to bear and thus, in a more attritional combat, deal out more damage a turn then their lighter opponents. It also justifys the enourmous power draw of lances somewhat, as they are heavy anti ship weapons.